I Made it Through the Fire Swamp... Okay, close.

How else should one introduce one’s first blog post in six months but with a Princess Bride reference? But that title’s about more than just being cute. The last six months of silence here have been kind of like wandering through the Fire Swamp… or a dumpster fire… or, you know, the Big B—Burnout.

Okay, not just kind of. That’s exactly what it was like. Because, with all the times that I’ve flirted with burnout before, this is the first time it actually happened.

Thus, an unprecedented six months between posts.

And you know, I’m not all the way through. Things are improving. I have more energy most days than I did. But it comes and goes, and I’m still finding the new equilibrium for my life.

I’m not going to rehash everything that’s happened in the last six months in detail, but for posterity, I will at least go over the highlights.

November & December:

After the delivery of our house in November, it was a few more weeks before we got the power and heat hooked up. But once those were connected, I spent all weekend long, every weekend, painting the house. Like, from supper Friday night until supper Sunday night, with breaks only to eat and sleep.

Jason was busy working on other projects with the house, with the help of our neighbour and friend, Brian S. (We are SO grateful Brian put so much time into the project.) Brian installed a water treatment system to remove the nasty iron from our well water and helped Jason get the second furnace for the addition attached (it goes under the house). Jason got a bit of help from another guy putting the foam insulation around the skirting, and managed to close it off before winter got too far along, which made our insurance company happy.

Jason and Brian were building our front steps—also to meet insurance requirements—on Christmas Eve. (SO thankful for Brian!)

New stairs for Christmas. :-)

But while they were doing all this, I was painting. And since the entire house needed it (there was a lot of damage to the walls because the previous owners’ kids were pretty hard on it), and it’s a lot of house, “painting” was not a small project.

Meanwhile, I did take a couple of trips to Edmonton with my mom when she went for her high-vitamin C therapy to treat her cancer.

And, starting December 1, my assignments for Move Up revved up. I was promoted to managing editor and started training a new writer, for which I was grateful and honoured, but which also increased my stress.

I had originally planned to take a two-week holiday at the end of December. Well, the “holiday” was from paid work. It was not a rest. You guessed it, I was painting.

Jude arrived home from Capernwray for his Christmas break in the first week of December, and he helped with projects for the house, including painting. So thankful for that!

Korra getting comfy on Jude in his new room one morning. Jude did most of the painting in here himself.

January:

The extreme stress I was under, including not feeling I had time to take breaks and feeling pressure to move into the new house so we wouldn’t be “split” between places any more, as well as the huge work load (I figured out I logged an average of 62.5 hours a week through all of 2020), started to pile up.

We managed to move our entire household into the new house by the second week of January. Noah slept in the old house about a week longer than the rest of us while we finished painting his room. Move Up assignments were due by January 15, but some of them were taking longer than expected, increasing my stress. I was supposed to start an editing project right after New Year’s, but my capacity was at about half of normal and most of that was being used up for Move Up.

The kids were home for the first week of school because of COVID restrictions (the whole school was working online until the 8th or something). So when I felt like I was losing my mind, I went and hid in the bathroom to cry.

I knew my mental health issues were because of more than stress, but I didn’t know what to do about it. Fortunately, I’d booked an appointment for myself at the same clinic my mom was going to for her treatments, and that appointment was in mid-January. When things got really bad starting in October, I’d googled my symptoms and was already pretty sure I was in perimenopause. I just didn’t know why I felt like I was going insane for a full week before my cycle every month, and I wanted to do something about it. (I feel so unprepared for perimenopause. Why does no one talk about this? I only heard the word for the first time a few years ago. I feel like it’s the “invisible” phase of a woman’s life.)

Unfortunately or fortunately, my cycle in January was the worst I’d ever had, and it coincided with a perfect storm of all those other stresses. I crashed. I burned. And I knew I absolutely had to do something different.

The first time my mom got cancer, she was around my age. I didn’t want to hit the same kind of health wall because of my work habits. Not only that, I physically couldn’t do what I’d been doing anymore.

So I made drastic changes.

• I quit Move Up as soon as the issue wrapped up.

• I quit all my other writing contracts. (I was doing work for a couple other brands and websites.)

• I reworked all my editing deadlines based on my new capacity and a reduced workload. When I contacted my clients, they all decided to continue on with me, even though their projects would stretch out much later than originally planned.

This was the scariest part of the process for me. I hate not meeting commitments, but I knew I had no choice but to make those changes. I also knew that if I lost clients, I could probably use that extra breathing room to heal.

Well, I didn’t lose any of them, for which I am so grateful.

At my appointment with the naturopath, she explained why my mood swings and health issues had become so extreme. The precursors for cortisol, the stress hormone, are the same as for estrogen. I’d basically been in fight-or-flight mode for a year (or longer?), and since survival is more important than reproduction, all my precursors were being used for cortisol. Thus the insane mood swings and prolonged depression for 7-10 days per month—perimenopause on steroids.

She got me onto some supplements and gave me some other things to work on to start to heal my adrenal glands and to start regulating my cycles a bit better. Between that and the reduced workload plan I already had in place, I left her office feeling more hopeful than I had in a very long time.

This unedited image showcases the exact colour Noah chose for his bedroom walls—and he loves it! My eyes, on the other hand, are still recovering… (If you’re wondering, it’s Benjamin Moore’s Lizard Green, 2030-10. There’s probably another person out there who’ll love this colour or be trying to figure out what it looks like on a wall, so, you’re welcome. Photo taken in a southwest-facing room near sunset at a high latitude in early January.)

February to Now:

Okay, I didn’t give myself quite as much grace on those first editing projects as I should have. I didn’t want to stretch those projects out too far. Unfortunately, this meant I was still working more than I probably should have for the last several months, and all non-essentials (like blogging) got perennially bumped from my list.

I just can’t hack those 60+-hour weeks anymore, either, which meant no working through weekends for me. I needed them to work on projects for the house, which we still haven’t finished renovating so we can move “all the way” in. But mostly I needed them for the mental break and, sometimes, a physical one, to just not do anything. Plus, I’m sleeping more than I ever have, because if I don’t, I pay.

Oh, I did try to work through a few weekends, and always paid for it. So nope, no more.

I’ve also been focusing on finishing the manuscript for The Sphinx’s Heart. Since this post is already pretty long, I’ll go into more detail about that in a future post. For now, just know that I’m currently at about 240k of a manuscript I now expect to hit 260k words, and it’s slated for release on October 19. There’s a lot more to the story, but I’ll save that for later.

In March, I took the Write Better-Faster 101 course from Becca Syme, which has helped me a great deal in seeing what systems and patterns contributed to burnout, as well as gave me tools for healing from it and to hopefully prevent it happening again. I highly recommend the course to all writers. She also has a YouTube videocast called the QuitCast, and several books for writers. (One of which I blogged about in January 2020, the last near miss I had with burnout.)

I’ve become a bit obsessed with houseplants. It’s a weird obsession, but it helps my mental health to watch things grow. And I discovered that what I call “obsessed” is nothing compared to the houseplant community at large. When I say it, I mean “I have quite a few more than the average person and I spend time maintaining them every day.” Not “the houseplants are taking over my house and are where all my discretionary income goes.”

My cats are helping, too.

Aang and Korra in my kitchen nook, along with a couple of plants enjoying some January sunshine.

And in March, they were testing out one of the two custom side tables Jason built for our new living room. :-) Cute catloafs, right?

These two are troublemakers, but they also bring me so much joy. I’m so thankful for them. This was one of the first days warm enough to have an open window. They were quite curious about all the things outside.

So, there you have it: my journey through the Fire Swamp. I got bit by a few R.O.U.S.’s and scorched by a few fire spurts, and I have a few new scars. But the trees are thinning and I know I’m getting close to the other side.

I hope I’ve learned my lesson this time. I think I’ve been flirting with burnout ever since Levi died. I push myself too hard and try to accomplish too much in too short a time. But I want my writing career to be sustainable. I want to be around for the long haul, still writing and editing books into old age.

And I want to have a life while I do it.

The more time goes on, the more I’m focusing on doing things that matter more and ignoring things that matter less. I’m going to bed earlier and waking up with my husband so I can spend all the time he’s at work (and the kids are at school, when they’re actually going—which they’re not right now because of lockdown, again) doing my own work, and more time with my family in the evenings. I’m constantly looking for ways to work less.

I’m proud to say that I’ve mostly achieved my goal of working an average of 48 hours a week so far this year. Some weeks, I work even less, though that’s usually because of extraneous circumstances—the commitments I’ve made can only be sustained if I keep to that 48 hours a week. But compared to 2020, this feels amazing. There’s time to breathe. And even read and watch TV and play with my plants…

I’ve dubbed 2021 my “year of self-care”. I’ve already made a lot of positive steps, and I’m feeling better. I hope by the time I’m completely out of the woods, these self-care habits have become so ingrained that I won’t have to think about them anymore. They’ll be an integral part of my new system.

So long as a six-fingered man doesn’t show up to take me to the Pit of Despair, I’ll be fine. :-)

Happy May, friend. I’ll be back again soon, I promise.

It might seem silly, but one of the self-care things I’ve been doing since about March is wearing makeup pretty often. It makes me feel better and more energetic knowing I have it on, so it’s a self-care win for me. :-)